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Nonclassical Light

Ask RP Photonics for advice concerning nonclassical light. Note that Dr. Paschotta has obtained his Ph. D. title for research on the generation of nonclassical light, and is very familiar with various generation and detection techniques in this context.

Definition: light with properties which can be explained only within quantum optics

Nonclassical light is light with nonclassical quantum noise properties, which can be understood only on the basis of quantum optics.
The most common forms of nonclassical light are the following:

Squeezed light exhibits reduced noise in one quadrature component.
The most familiar kinds of squeezed light have either reduced intensity noise or reduced phase noise, with increased noise of the other kind.

Fock states (also called photon number states) have a well-defined number of photons (stored e.g. in a cavity), whereas the phase is totally undefined.
A special case is that of a single-photon state, as generated on demand by a photon gun.

Nonclassical light sometimes exhibits photon antibunching, i.e. a reduced probability of two photons being detected within a short time interval, or sub-Poissonian photon statistics.

Also, there are states with special correlations between two or more different light beams.
For example, signal and idler in parametric amplification exhibit strong intensity noise correlations, because signal/idler photons are generated in pairs.
Nonclassical correlations of different light beams also occur in the context of quantum nondemolition measurements.